Yeah, why regulate anything? Lead paint? Sure, kids love wall candy! Tainted peanut butter? You should have known better than to buy something without testing it for e. coli yourself! Federal safety standards for cars are just getting in the way of Detroit’s ability to innovate! Who needs the Clean Water Act, Lake Erie was way better when it was on fire! Why charge 1400% interest on a cash advance loan? Why raise the price of an EpiPen by 600% in less than 10 years? Why create 2 million fraudulent accounts and collect fees when your money-shuffling scheme causes someone’s mortgage payment to overdraft their account? Because nobody’s stopping them.
Business does not operate in the best interests of society. They exist to make money. It is society’s (and therefore government’s) responsibility to ensure that businesses behave themselves, and punish them when their actions harm others. Payday lenders don’t have to force anyone to take out a loan with 1400% interest to buy gas to get to work before their next paycheck, they just need to exist in the space created between shitty wages and increasing costs of living to exploit anyone desperate enough to be looking for help. People make bad decisions under stress, and that’s not something that “more education” can easily fix; it’s how our brains work.
It’s weird. “Businesses don’t care about you, they exist to make money” is the first thing anyone says whenever someone expresses surprise or confusion when a business does something bad, like it’s justification for them being allowed to do whatever they want. Yet when we try to regulate their excesses and abuses, suddenly businesses are the purest of souls, guided by the Benevolent Hand of the Free Market, and would never do anything that might jeopardize long-term good in the name of short-term profit, and the problem clearly lies with the victims of the business’s actions for not knowing better, but you can’t fix stupid so what’re you gonna do?
